Staff —

“Donglegate” is classic overreaction—and everyone pays

Or, how not to deal with difficult social issues.

Watching "Donglegate" unfold over the past few days has been like watching a comedy of errors slowly metastasize into a tragedy of thoughtlessness. News coverage of what unfolded at (and after) this year's PyCon developer conference has already been written; I'll assume that you’re up to speed. What follows is straight opinion about a silly situation.

As events unfolded from Sunday until today, partisans quickly formed to weigh in on some key questions. Was SendGrid evangelist Adria Richards right or wrong to take offense at the jokes in question? Were the two male developers out of bounds with their "dongle" comments? Did they even say the things they were accused of? Was taking the matter right to Twitter the wrong way to go? Was the termination of two people—including Richards herself—a preferred outcome? How did DDoS vigilantes get involved in a complaint over some genital jokes? Finally: how long until the lawsuits?

Let's start by spreading the blame where it's deserved: on nearly everyone involved. The "Boy’s Club” mentality is thankfully no longer acceptable in tech, but it's still common—some people have actually described tech to me as "men's work." The jokes appear to run afoul of PyCon's code of conduct, which strives to create a welcoming atmosphere for everyone, and their unfunny-ness is equaled only by their lameness. “Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women. While such sexually inappropriate comments are completely unnacceptable in professional settings (to many men as well as women), neither merits firing unless someone had a history of making unwelcome comments. A teaching opportunity should not generally be turned into a termination event. (PlayHaven, which employed both developers, says that it will not comment "on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways" with one developer, so it's not clear what the exact situation here was.)

Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers.

Yet these two men don’t get all of the blame. One recurring theme on message boards and chat rooms, including our own, is that while Richards had every right to report the behavior of the two men to conference organizers, snapping their photograph and posting it publicly to "Twitter shame" them was a step too far (speaking of a step too far, there are other, more repugnant recurring themes among commenters, too). They're right; going public was not the only way Richards could get a relatively minor issue addressed. She could have confronted the two men or she could have gone straight to PyCon. Her actions only escalated the situation.

In a blog post explaining the story in her own words, Richards wrote about how, over the course of the jokes, she moved from “I was going to let it go” to “I realized I had to do something.” The moment of decision came after seeing a picture of a young girl on the main stage who had attended a Young Coders workshop. “She would never have the chance to learn and love programming,” Richards wrote, “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.”

Clearly, this is hyperbole. These two guys weren’t going to prevent anybody from doing anything. Suddenly, a couple off-color jokes represented all the serious forces that can hold women back from tech careers. While denouncing bad behavior certainly has its place, proportion is important—and this approach to these jokes simply makes it harder to have a sincere discussion about misogyny and men's/women's issues in the workplace.

Richards decided that her method of intervention would combine public shaming on Twitter as well as pinging PyCon organizers to do something about the incident. Richards said that she “was a guest in the Python community and as such, I wanted to give PyCon the opportunity to address this.” This is why she did not confront the two men directly. Instead, she pinged PyCon and, well, the rest of the Internet. Sledgehammer, meet nail. (To its great credit, PyCon appears to have handled the issue well, speaking to both parties and securing an apology from the developers.)

In the aftermath, one of the developers lost his job and Richards eventually lost hers too. While I believe that Richards unfairly shamed these guys in public (two wrongs don’t make a right, as they say), PlayHaven and SendGrid emerge as the real reputational losers here. Ironically, the companies shared in the same core mistake Richards made. The asymmetry of incident and response has now elevated Donglegate from dust-up into life-changing event for at least two people, and it didn't have to end this way at all.

On Sunday at PyCon, Adria Richards felt comments made behind her during a conference session were inappropriate and of an offensive, sexual nature. We understand that Adria believed the conduct to be inappropriate and support her right to report the incident to PyCon personnel. To be clear, SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs.

What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation. Even PyCon has since updated their Code of Conduct due to this situation. Needless to say, a heated public debate ensued. The discourse, productive at times, quickly spiraled into extreme vitriol.

A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.

In the end, the consequences that resulted from how she reported the conduct put our business in danger. Our commitment to our 130 employees, their families, our community members and our more than 130,000 valued customers is our primary concern.

tl;dr: it's a bit of a 3-way:* They disagree (as many do) with the way she handled the event* They feel she can't effectively be a dev evangelist for them anymore (can't fault them on that)* She indirectly put the whole business and customers in dangers (which is probably a reference to the DDOS)

I came across that image while poking around for image ideas for this story, and Peter made an excellent observation: "dongle" jokes are obviously mainstream and tame enough that you can air them on the largest commercial broadcast in the world (eek hope that's true, it's big though!) and apparently no one blinks.

We don't know what the joke actually was, and I'm not even really trying to excuse it, but I do think it's fascinating that it's apparently part of our cultural experience, and not just limited to bearded programmers.

Everyone lost today. Tech, the Python community, the programming community, men, women, the 2 people who got fired, everyone.

Perhaps Adria should have exposed their behavior in some other way, like writing to the PyCon people directly, or turning around and speaking to the guys herself. But she didn't. And you know what? The "hey, look at these assholes!" pic and tweet kind of stuff happens all the time, all over the world. You or I have probably done something similar, but it just faded into the background of inane content that no one cares about. Regardless of her previous behavior online (which quite frankly, seems to be a little racist at times), I don't feel that she was in the wrong in this specific instance.

Basically, two dudes said something stupid. She tweeted "look at these assholes!" PlayHaven extremely overreacted by firing one of the dudes. Parts of the Python and perhaps parts of the general programming community extremely overreacted to Adria. SendGrid overreacted slightly by firing Adria.

Yes, SendGrid needs to have developer advocates that can represent their company in a good light. I think firing Adria right now makes them also look bad, in the "Sorry men, she's gone now, can we be friends again? kthxbye!" vein. What SendGrid should have done is give Adria a chance to quell the situation in SendGrid's favor, or at least give her guidance in how to do so. Maybe even suspend her, or some sort of internal corporate disciplinary action, and let this whole controversy end with time. Adria may learn from this on how to handle the internet dragon better, but SendGrid lost the opportunity to have this stronger person work for them. Maybe she won't learn anything from this, but the timing of her firing was still poor PR for SendGrid. Keep in mind, I still don't think her initial tweet was morally wrong.

SendGrid made the mistake of thinking that the few vocal assholes represents everyone. I'd bet the majority of the Python community just wishes that everyone would shut the fuck up and code. Unfortunately, in human behavior, the loud people get the attention, and online, those are assholes and trolls.

Unfortunately, PlayHaven and SendGrid were so afraid of the internet dragon, that they sacrificed two people to it in an attempt to appease. The thing is, the internet dragon is never appeased, it's never full, it's rage and fire never ends. All you can do is turn it's attention elsewhere, or hide until it moves on to other prey.

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

People are idiots. I don't mean certain groups. ALL people are idiots. Some can get very smart on one or two topics, but otherwise they are just dumb. I've worked with people who had "chief scientist" in their job titles who were leaders in a field. Then they open their mouths on something outside their field- politics, culture, law, whatever- and you just lose all faith in the human race after you pick your jaw up off the floor.

This is the way it is. Toxic cultures and mind cancers. The end. Now downvote me into oblivion to hide the truth.

I'm not convinced that her firing was inappropriate or "over the top" to be honest. Per my other comment I think SendGrid has a pretty legitimate concern here. Whether or not they had released her the incident "went viral" and she has gained a certain level of notoriety for this, and that notoriety is going to have a pretty negative impact on her ability to represent the company. Her job was entirely to speak with (evangelize to?) other developers about the SendGrid product. Those potential customers probably don't want to deal with somebody who has publicly demonstrated (apparently repeatedly!) that they are willing to escalate issues through inappropriate channels and do not take offense well.

SendGrid probably could've picked better timing for their decision, but I view it as both sensible and inevitable.

“Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women.

The way you say it generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

When it comes to SendGrid, I don't know. They were basically in a Charybdis & Scylla situations as they were getting blackmailed via DDOS over the mess: I may be wrong, but I believe they had been pretty much entirely unavailable since things starting going south ~2 days ago.

So they were in the unenviable position of supporting Adria and making all their customers pay (because these customers had been without service since the start of the DDOS and would remain so until the trolls would get bored or SendGrid brought in DDOS mitigation expert and they did their magic) or resuming service to customers at the cost of Adria's employment. I've never had to make this kind of shitty choice, and I seriously hope I'll never have to, the way I see it they were pretty likely to lose either way.

PlayHaven I can't see a good side of, the CEO's purportedly clarifying blog post doesn't clarify anything and looks like a tentative ass-covering lawyerspeak, the non-publication of any comment made on the blog (I'm sure there were comments) does not help.

Quote:

SendGrid probably could've picked better timing for their decision, but I view it as both sensible and inevitable.

Well I don't know what their official party line is, but it's pretty obvious they fired her in order to make the DDOS stop and be able to resume service to customers (it worked too), they weren't really in control of timing (as opposed to playhaven)

It seems that the new brand of political correctness going around means that one person's outrage has far too much power to cause other people trouble.

Not to pull out an "when I was younger," but I honestly don't recall this kind of validation of personal outrage even a decade ago. Nowdays, it seems common for one person's outrage to be taken more seriously than the rights of other people to be outrageous.

None of these people: the developers cracking jokes nor the woman who publicly shamed them, was acting particularly mature that day. Some people just need to grow up.

The way you say it is generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

In what way are jokes about sex inherently sexist? This is something I've heard repeatedly and I have to admit I just don't understand it.

The jokes may be puerile, juvenile, in poor taste, etc. These jokes sounded like all of those things. I just don't understand in what way they are sexist.

Getting offended about anything is ridiculous. Even more so when its not a direct attack on you or your rights. This lady should have shut the hell up, and made a mental note not to befriend the two guys because apparently she lacks a sense of humor.

So they were in the unenviable position of supporting Adria and making all their customers pay (because these customers had been without service since the start of the DDOS and would remain so until the trolls would get bored or SendGrid brought in DDOS mitigation expert and they did their magic) or resuming service to customers at the cost of Adria's employment. I've never had to make this kind of shitty choice, and I seriously hope I'll never have to, the way I see it they were pretty likely to lose either way.

What's the phrase? "We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Sometimes doing the right thing is painful, but you can't let that be an excuse to do the easy thing.

If her employer was going to fire her for her own actions, I can live with that. It is their choice, after all. I don't like the idea that they caved in to some sort of DDOS blackmail. I hope that's not what happened here.

So they were in the unenviable position of supporting Adria and making all their customers pay (because these customers had been without service since the start of the DDOS and would remain so until the trolls would get bored or SendGrid brought in DDOS mitigation expert and they did their magic) or resuming service to customers at the cost of Adria's employment. I've never had to make this kind of shitty choice, and I seriously hope I'll never have to, the way I see it they were pretty likely to lose either way.

What's the phrase? "We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Sometimes doing the right thing is painful, but you can't let that be an excuse to do the easy thing.

If her employer was going to fire her for her own actions, I can live with that. It is their choice, after all. I don't like the idea that they caved in to some sort of DDOS blackmail. I hope that's not what happened here.

“Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women.

The way you say it is generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

When thinking about all of the sex jokes that I've made, I tend to agree that the nature of the joke kind of has an effect on how far out of line these guys were. I have definitely made crude jokes in the presence of the opposite sex that were not, strictly speaking, misogynistic, unless one considers all sex jokes to be misogynistic.

Frankly, sex jokes aren't just for guys, and conversely it's not only women who can be offended by them.

Finally, I wonder how loud these guys were being. Whispering and snickering to themselves is a lot different than loudly commenting. Either is unprofessional, but then again, conferences are boring, and it's not unusual to get a running commentary going in that case. The point being, beyond overreacting, it seems to me that Richards was using sexual equality as a pretext for being vindictive because some guys were annoying her. Given her willingness to make similar jokes, I kind of doubt that it was the nature of the jokes that she had a problem with.

That's all fine and good when you're a government, it becomes much cheaper to take moral stances when you can actually afford it (for pretty much all values of afford: monetary, PR, obligation to clients, etc...).

For a startup with clients relying on the service it's a much more complex issue and — again having never been in the situation — I'm not going to cast the first stone because I don't know how I'd react either as the business itself or one of its clients.

TomXP411 wrote:

Sometimes doing the right thing is painful, but you can't let that be an excuse to do the easy thing.

When doing "the right thing" kills the business, I fail to see an upside to it.

The way you say it is generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

In what way are jokes about sex inherently sexist? This is something I've heard repeatedly and I have to admit I just don't understand it.

The jokes may be puerile, juvenile, in poor taste, etc. These jokes sounded like all of those things. I just don't understand in what way they are sexist.

I was speaking in general terms when I said something can turn a lighthearted joke into slander. Because we don't have a good audio recording of what the guys said we can only speculate on the exact words and on the tone of their voices. I don't see where we disagree other than a slight misunderstanding (probably aided by my misspellings).

I love how two adults make some childish jokes with each other is somehow a great offense to a programming convention, but on the other hand you've got one of the largest yearly conventions on the planet that has a foundation of lewd humor and near nudity and for decades nobody blinked an eye.

I'm talking of course about E3, which has toned things down a bit from previous years.

I don't know, just seems like everyone needs to chillax and leave shit alone.

So they were in the unenviable position of supporting Adria and making all their customers pay (because these customers had been without service since the start of the DDOS and would remain so until the trolls would get bored or SendGrid brought in DDOS mitigation expert and they did their magic) or resuming service to customers at the cost of Adria's employment. I've never had to make this kind of shitty choice, and I seriously hope I'll never have to, the way I see it they were pretty likely to lose either way.

What's the phrase? "We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Sometimes doing the right thing is painful, but you can't let that be an excuse to do the easy thing.

If her employer was going to fire her for her own actions, I can live with that. It is their choice, after all. I don't like the idea that they caved in to some sort of DDOS blackmail. I hope that's not what happened here.

Perhaps they fired her since she made d*ck jokes on her own twitter account. What good for the geese...

SendGrid probably could've picked better timing for their decision, but I view it as both sensible and inevitable.

Well I don't know what their official party line is, but it's pretty obvious they fired her in order to make the DDOS stop and be able to resume service to customers (it worked too), they weren't really in control of timing (as opposed to playhaven)

Why is that obvious? I'd hope that the folks at SendGrid would understand the internet "DDoS culture" which is primarily centered on senseless violence. Firing her in this environment is equally likely to generate *more* DDoS as it is less. The sort of DDoSery that happens from the non-professional-criminal sector is effectively random ("for the lulz").

On top of that pie is the whip cream of all the incredibly negative attention the story is getting for them. They may simply have decided to cut their losses and rip the Band-Aid off immediately instead of riding out the storm only to make the same decision down the road, re-igniting the whole issue after it died down.

Sorry, but pig shaming is completely analogous to slut shaming. Just because a woman dresses or acts one way doesn't give you the right to judge her or publicly shame her, and just because a man says something that you don't like doesn't mean that you can judge him and publicly shame him.

It's a 2 way street, and we won't see a shred of true equality until we come to grips with that.

Situations like these are when people need to take a moment and think about the consequences before they decide to resort to publicly shaming someone, especially over an incident that while inappropriate, certainly didn't rise to the level of needing twitter shame. Once its done, you can't take it back. It would have been quite easy to contact the Pycon staff and let them deal with the situation.

There are situations where termination is necessary, we had an employee that went on an anti gay tirade over our intercom used for the directors, producers and talent to communicate. It was hateful, and had no place in the workplace and was not simply a one or two word reaction. If these developers had been engaged in such hate speech, I'd say fire them on the spot, but this did not rise to that level.

I'd hope that the folks at SendGrid would understand the internet "DDoS culture" which is primarily centered on senseless violence. Firing her in this environment is equally likely to generate *more* DDoS as it is less.

I'm sure they do and they weighted that in their decision, or at least hope so.

doubleyewdee wrote:

The sort of DDoSery that happens from the non-professional-criminal sector is effectively random ("for the lulz").

In this case it most definitely was not random, it was quite definitely a bunch of people doing it in reaction to the event.

“Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women.

The way you say it generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

(edited for spelling)

I disagree. It's a professional setting and even the lighthearted sexual joke is simply inappropriate. Doesn't deserve a firing, but it's inappropriate, nonetheless.

Those of us still in possession of our "dongles" understand the concept of a A-B conversation where party C should mind their business.

We understand that even "Coded" conversation not directed at someone does not constitute harrassment.

Furthermore had you done your research you would find that Pycon signed onto a sexist, misandrist nonsense from The Ada Initiative Which has this BS:

"

Certain sexual topics can trigger PTSD in people who have been sexually assaulted, and can be perceived as encouragement to humiliate, objectify, and assault women, regardless of the intent of the speaker.

Discussing sex creates a “sexualized environment” which many people take as a signal to treat women as sexual objects rather than as fellow conference attendees, resulting in a higher incidence of harassment and assault of women. Too many women have been raped at technical conferences; we should do everything we can to prevent future rapes.

Many people are unable to separate “talking about sex” and “saying derogatory things about women,” and take the introduction of one for permission to do the other.

Sex in many societies is strongly tied to the objectification and humiliation of women."

Which ought never have been signed on to. Seriously?

" Many people are unable to separate “talking about sex” and “saying derogatory things about women,” and take the introduction of one for permission to do the other."

*enter many many expletives*

No sir. Pycon was WRONG. the woman was WRONG,

The two men were innocently MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS and did nothing WRONG.

Poor jokes and double entendres to each other do not make for a harassing environment.

And as far as I know there have been no *documented rapes* at a tech conference.

“Forking a repo” and “big dongles” must rank somewhere around "0.5: classless brospeak" on the seismic scale of harassing/menacing behavior toward women.

The way you say it generally matters to an equal degree compared to the literal words spoken, the tone of your voice can turn a scorn into a lighthearted joke, it can also turn what could be a lighthearted joke into foul sexist slander.

(edited for spelling)

I disagree. It's a professional setting and even the lighthearted sexual joke is simply inappropriate. Doesn't deserve a firing, but it's inappropriate, nonetheless.

No, we don't disagree. I commented only on the joke/slander itself. I fully agree that even attempting such a joke (even a honestly lighthearted one) is very likely out of bounds in any setting like that.